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2007 December 28 Aquaventure Reef Club, Anilao, Batangas

By on Saturday, December 29, 2007

Went to Anilao with Billie for her annual dive. We got there quite early and had to wait for the divemaster to finish breakfast. When he arrived, it turned out to be Jake, the same divemaster from my previous dive. He asked us where we want to dive and we chose to dive Sombrero and Twin Rocks because he said he saw turtles there on his last dive.

Unfortunately, we didn’t see any turtles. But we did see some dolphins from afar on the way to Sombrero, an octopus (under a rock), a ray (my first sighting of one out in the open), a school of jacks, a school of juvenile barracudas, and of course the clouds of tiny colorful fishes. The last is always a very pretty sight. Who needs an aquarium when the sea is your aquarium, right?

Oh and I didn’t get majorly lost during the drive to and from Aquaventure. And no relying on my GPS unit at that. Just a good old map that I printed from the web. Or maybe it’s just that my co-driver/navigator has improved :))

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Gadgets

USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Adapter

By on Saturday, September 1, 2007

This one is one of those indispensable techie tools. It’s a 3-in-1 external drive adapter from large IDE, small IDE, and SATA interface to USB 2.0. This means that with only one kit, you can connect practically ANY disk-based storage device via high-speed USB 2.0 to your PC. That would be 5.25″ form-factor CD and DVD drives, 3.5″ desktop hard drives, and 2.5″ notebook hard drives. You can also connect both a SATA and an IDE device at the SAME time. And here’s the clincher: there’s no fancy shmancy casings. Only exposed wires and circuit boards. How geek cool is that?

It’s available in most computer shops (I got mine from AWD at Robinson’s Galleria) or online (including, of course, the famous Brando).

Here is a more comprehensive review.

Rating: 4/5

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Gadgets

Notebook Malfunction

By on Friday, July 27, 2007

Encountered a malfunction with my new Thinkpad T60. When I got to work this morning, I plugged it in and opened the lid. Normally, this should wake it up from standby mode. Nothing. So I pressed on the power button to power it down. Nothing. I unplugged it, removed and reinstalled the battery, plugged it back in and pressed the power button. It started up and started making beeping sounds. Not good. Jon and I thought it’s a memory issue, so I opened the notebook up, removed and reinstalled the memory but to no avail. I called up the supplier and they, to their credit, immediately sent in a technician to fix it. Apparently I didn’t try hard enough, because it turned out that a loose memory module was indeed the culprit. How it got loose (bumps? vibrations?) I don’t know. I certainly expected more robustness from a notebook and a Thinkpad to boot. Is this a deterioration of quality due to the handover by IBM to Lenovo? I certainly hope not.

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Gadgets

The Soul Of A New Machine

By on Sunday, July 15, 2007

I finished migrating all (I hope) of my data from Selene, my personal Thinkpad X22, to Ilsa, my new office Thinkpad T60. The migration itself was rather painless but then again, I’ve done it quite a few times already.

So far everything seems to be running well and I don’t seem to be missing any data. But to be sure, I’ll be monitoring the data next week before I completely sanitize the copy on Selene. We don’t want anyone finding incriminating evidence now, do we?

I actually much prefer carrying and using the smaller and lighter Selene but I’ll be lending her to a dear friend of mine who will be going to the US for a month. He doesn’t have a notebook and being the nice person that I am I volunteered to lend him one. Hahaha.

I, of course, I have another, more pragmatic, reason. I’m again dabbling into software development and the X-series was not really designed for such things. The T-series, on the other hand, is a real problem-solving, number-crunching, data-processing machine so it should help things go faster.

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General

2007 May 5 to 6 Puerto Galera, Mindoro

By on Monday, May 7, 2007

IMGP1651Went with the IT Department to Puerto Galera in Mindoro last weekend. I decided to drive to make it more convenient for the girls as well as for GPS data gathering. So with my Garmin Foretrex GPS unit recording a track, I picked up the girls from various points early in the morning. The rest of the boys took the bus.

The trip took about 3 hours taking us through the South Luzon Expressway, the Star Tollway, several national roads, and finally to the Batangas Port where we caught the 5AM boat.

We were informed that boats are scheduled at 15-minute intervals. To our– and the other passengers’– irritation, “15-minute intervals” actually was just one boat waiting for a whole hour! Thankfully, the boat eventually filled up and finally left the pier and in about 2 hours we were in White Beach in Puerto Galera. Aby– who organized the trip (Thanks Aby!)– and her friend Maica welcomed us to our accommodations.

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